diff --git a/evaluations/arweave.md b/evaluations/arweave.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..9d995f3 --- /dev/null +++ b/evaluations/arweave.md @@ -0,0 +1,48 @@ +An evaluation of the Arweave paper +================================== + +2021-05-18 Dagger Team + +https://www.arweave.org/yellow-paper.pdf + +Goal of this evaluation is to find things to adopt or avoid while designing +Dagger. It is not meant to be a criticism of Arweave. + +#### Pros: + ++ There is no distinction between full and light clients, merely clients that + downloaded more or less of the blockweave. (§2.2) ++ Prefential treatment of peers is discouraged, because nodes are unaware when + they're being monitored for responsiveness. (§3.4.2) ++ Interesting 'meta-game' on top of tit-for-tat, in which nodes monitor their + peers on how they rank other peers. (§6.1) ++ Because behaviour of nodes is largely based on local rules and the local view + that a node has of its peers, the network is able to shift behaviour gradually + in response to a changing environment. (§6.2) + +#### Cons: + +- Proof of Work is used for the underlying blockweave (§3.1), which is + rather wasteful. +- Data is stored indefinitely, which is great for public information, but not so + great for ephemeral private data. This makes storage unnecessarily expensive + for data with a short lifespan. (§3.1) +- Network is free at point of use for external users, raising questions about + scalability of the network when faced with highly popular content. (§3.4.2) + Incentives for data replication help (§7.1.2), but it is unlikely that it + will hold up when the network grows in content (§8.2, §8.3). These incentives + can also lead to unnecessary duplication of unpopular content. +- Nodes with limited connectivity are discouraged from participating in the + network, which precludes use on mobile devices. (§3.4.3) +- There is an economic incentive for a miner to not to share old blocks with + other miners, because it increases its chance of "winning" the new block. + (§4.1.1) +- There is an economic incentive for miners to have the strictest censorship + rules, because otherwise a block that it mined might be rejected by others. + (§5.1) +- The majority of the network determines the censorship rules. This could prove + troublesome should Arweave's Proof of Work lead to similar geographic + centralization of mining power as we see in Bitcoin. (§5.3) +- Transaction ID is used for addressing, instead of a content hash. (§7.1.1) +- Uses HTTP for inter-node traffic, instead of an established peer-to-peer + protocol. (§7.1.3)